I'm discovering that many Internet radio sources differ wildly in their quality of signal. Some are quite 'hot' in the high end. KCSM (www.kcsm.org) is one where I get this via MS media player. Others are quite muffled leading me to believe that the studio engineers aren't paying attention to the signal matching.
The most consistent quality audio stream I get is from KPLU (www.kplu.org) in Tacoma, WA. Excellent bloom and imaging from my M-audio USB outboard soundcard. I listen to it all day when working from my home office.
BTW, I'm not one for attempting to operate from an internal soundcard that relies on the awful switching supplies in PCs - even using an outboard DAC. The nice thing about USB or Firewire is that you've got clocked data streams instead of that poorly-thoughtout SPDIF.
Cheers,
David
The most consistent quality audio stream I get is from KPLU (www.kplu.org) in Tacoma, WA. Excellent bloom and imaging from my M-audio USB outboard soundcard. I listen to it all day when working from my home office.
BTW, I'm not one for attempting to operate from an internal soundcard that relies on the awful switching supplies in PCs - even using an outboard DAC. The nice thing about USB or Firewire is that you've got clocked data streams instead of that poorly-thoughtout SPDIF.
Cheers,
David